Mom!!!

Much like my junior high and high school experience, motherhood has involved me spending my every waking moment thinking about a guy who has no idea what my name is...until today! I've been sick all week with some kind of weird laryngitis-y cold that seemed to get worse last night. I told Brad that if I didn't get to sleep in for once I was going to seriously lose my mind. Note for you non-parents that "sleeping in" is nothing like it was back in our pre-Tate days when we had blissful, uninterrupted sleep until noon on the weekends if we wanted it. Now it means waking up at 7something a.m., going back to sleep with a pillow over your head, and being roused into semi-wakefulness every 15 minutes by the muffled sounds of your spouse dealing with varying degrees of mayhem.

Anyway, after a couple hours of super-nonrestful sleep I opened the bedroom door and heard Tate call "Mom" from the living room. I was so excited that he said my name for the first time that I picked him up and started jumping up and down like a crazy person. And once he saw how excited I was he started laughing and repeating "Mom" over and over again, which led to more jumping up and down and laughing. It was seriously the best morning ever. Not to mention that while I was asleep Brad answered a text on my phone and made a brunch date for me with my friend Beth.

As I was getting ready I looked in the mirror and realized that I'm the person is who Tate is going to forever associate with the word "Mom." It was very cool, scary, and humbling all at the same time. I also thought that Tate's Mom looks like a hot mess much of the time these days. Sorry, kid.

I'm just sitting here enjoying these bon bons and waiting for my massage....

An exchange from a rare girls' night out last night:

WEIRD GUY IN BAR I ACCIDENTLY GAVE MY (REAL) E-MAIL ADDRESS TO SINCE I'M SO OUT OF PRACTICE I FORGOT HOW TO BE MEAN TO WEIRD GUYS IN BARS: "So, what do you do for a living?"

ME: "I stay home with my 17-month-old son."

WEIRD GUY: "Yeah, I don't do sh*t either."

Reflecting on 2011

So much happened in 2011! Tate learned to roll over. And sit, crawl, stand, dance, give high-fives, give kisses to his stuffed toys, and sleep through the night. He got his first 5 teeth. He learned to say his first words (variations on "da da," something that sounds like "open" and "open this," and sometimes something that sounds like "all done"). He started to understand us too. Now when we ask him if needs a new diaper he just crawls down the hall and sits in front of the door to his room. Although whenever anyone asks him to point to Mommy he just looks at them blankly. We'll have to work on that one. He also took his first trip on an airplane, and we had our first family vacation.

We had a lot to celebrate this year. Tate turned 1 in August. Brad turned 40 in December. I'll have to post some photos of that one sometime. I actually let my parents babysit him for the first time so that we could go out and celebrate with a night of Whirlyball and other mischief (turns out Liar's Club is just as much fun as I remembered). My Mom had trouble lowering a sleeping Tater into his crib and dropped him the last little bit or so, smacking his head on the side of his crib. He cried, kept them up, and my Mom now has to go to PT for her injured back (lowering him into his crib aggravated a previous injury). It may have to be another milestone birthday before they offer to babysit again, but we really appreciated it.

We had sad times too. We had some people close to us go through a number of health challenges. We keep them in our thoughts and pray for better days ahead. And I still miss my grandmother very much and think of her often. I still can't believe that last year was our last Christmas together. It hit especially hard on Christmas Eve when I would have normally gone to the candlelight service with her at her church. It still makes me happy, though, that there is a part of her in Tater. And in me too, now that I think of it.

I remember back at the end of 2008 when I seriously considered writing a the following Christmas letter: "Dear friends and family, 2008 can suck it. Love, Brad and Sandra." It makes me very grateful for the past year.

Wedding Memories

Brad and I celebrated our 5th anniversary a couple of weeks ago by staying home with Tate, who was finishing getting over hand, foot, and mouth disease. Brad was sick as well with what we are pretty sure was the same thing. Whoo hoo! Any celebration of this milestone (5 years of wedded bliss that is, not having HFM) was postponed until January.


But speaking of weddings, if you've had one you remember all that goes into planning one. I remember it especially well since we had a 4-month engagement and I thought I was going to lose my mind. So many details. What type of invites to have. What color ink to use. Which font. What to wear. Location, centerpieces, photographer, what to serve, how to buy a condo and pay for wedding at the same time and not go broke....blah, blah, blah. Want to know what the guest takeaway was from all that 5 years later?



Last weekend we were out celebrating Brad's 40th and a friend of Brad's told me that the one thing he always remembers when he thinks of our wedding is that we had served asparagus at dinner (which I didn't even remember) and that by the end the night the men's bathroom reeked of asparagus pee. Yup, 4 months of frantic planning and the big takeaway was asparagus pee. Hilarious. So really folks, don't worry if the post office is out of the "LOVE" stamps like the crazed bride-to-be who was in line in front of me last time I was there. In five years no one will remember. But do serve asparagus.

Fall Fun, Part I

Lately I've been itching to get out of the city and do some fall camping or hiking. Since we don't have any plans in the works I've been trying to find ways to get my nature fix without leaving town. Last weekend we went up to the North Park Village Nature Center at Pulaski and Peterson. It was our first time there, and I was pretty impressed. It's a forty-six acre nature preserve that includes four different habitats: a woodland, a wetland, a prairie, and an oak savanna. (As an interesting footnote, the area used to house the city's tuberculosis sanitarium until 1974 when, owing to medical advances, there was no longer a need for one.)

Tate had a great time; he has started pointing and reaching for things now, and he wanted to touch and see everything. It was so exciting to see him so interested in nature (although he also wants to touch everything on the CTA bus, so maybe his interest wasn't in nature per se). We saw geese, a doe and her fawn, about a bazillion bees (the yellow flowers in the picture are just covered with them), and Tate's personal favorite, squirrels. We saw a handful of families with older kids, and I was thinking of how much Tate will enjoy coming there when he can walk on the trails on his own. The trails are a lot shorter than they look on the map, so it's a perfect hike for little legs. Since major roads surround the preserve you can still hear traffic and sirens so it wasn't quite as remote as we'd hoped, but it was still exciting to find a place like that in the city.

If I ever see my life flash before my eyes...

...I'll be super glad to finally know what happened to all of my lost stuff.

Today I spent the better part of an hour retracing our steps to try to find one of Tate's shoes. Tate hates shoes and socks, but I felt like I had to put them on since when I don't strangers like to tell me that he's going to be too cold (which is exactly what happened after he lost the first one and I took the other one off so we wouldn't lose it too). It was one of his cute little baseball Robeez that I bought on eBay last spring since I was no way going to pay full price for Robeez. I came home a shoe short and so grouchy Brad even went out later and looked for it, but no luck. What happened to it? Did some other kid grab it? A strong wind blew it into a sewer? Is someone's dog in bed happily gnawing on it right now? Just another of life's mysteries, I guess.

(illustration via julianmizuki.blogspot.com)

Bad mommy

By now most of you have probably heard about this lawsuit in which some rich kids tried to sue their mom for emotional distress for things like failing to send college care packages, trying to make her son wear a seatbelt, and asking her daughter to come home at midnight from a homecoming celebration. (That daughter should have lived in my house; my curfew was midnight and my parents would set a radio alarm clock with the volume turned up all the way in our living room for just after midnight. If I wasn’t home to turn it off the parents would be awake and very, very mad. If I had been smart I would have come home, turned it off, and then gone back out...but I wasn’t.) Anyway, this got me thinking of all of the things Tater could possibly try to sue us for down the road. It’s not a short list.

-Failing to recognize that he had jaundice when he was born even though he was orange as a pumpkin (we thought he was just tan).
-Bringing him home from the hospital on a germy CTA bus.
-Dropping the home phone (Brad) and cell phone (me) on his head when he was a couple months old.
-Letting him nap in his bouncer for the first 6 months since we couldn’t get him to nap in his crib.
-Failing to read the sleep/baby books ahead of time so that we’d know how to get him to nap in his crib.
-Getting him an Easter basket filled with candy we like rather than something he could actually enjoy.
-Not feeding him much in the way of finger foods until close to his first birthday since we thought he shouldn’t have them since he didn’t have teeth and would choke. (Turns out babies don’t need teeth to eat. See above: failure to read baby books.)
-Letting his 3-year-old cousin Tondi tongue kiss him (and taking a photo of it).
-Me lying to a superskinny salesperson that I didn’t know what size dress I needed since I’d “just had a baby” even though Tate was a year old (and not with me at the time, which is why I got away with it).
-Failing to make homemade cupcakes for his first birthday even though I said I would.

I’m sure there is more. I’m really glad the “bad mommy” lawsuit was thrown out. I don't need that kind of precedent hanging over my head.